What Is Life Like After 18 Days Indoors With Only Phone Apps? | The First 144 Hours

唐云路 · 2015-08-09 · English translation

This is not a contest to see who can stay home longest. QDaily Research Lab wants to find out whether the new wave of at-home services can give us a better quality of life.

For the past 144 hours, I have not left the small two-bedroom apartment I rent. For the next 288, I will stay put.

In these six days, 34 strangers have knocked on my door. Some brought parcels, some delivered food, some came to provide a service, and some carried away all sorts of things.

I meet every need in my life through phone apps, from simple things like takeout and parcels to medicine when I'm sick, phone repairs and a chef who comes to cook at home. The experiment asks one question: at a time when internet startups are booming as never before, how far can phone apps improve our quality of life?

There is no script. When emergencies came up, I once ordered someone through an app to run to the bank and pay my electricity bill. I have also waited more than ten hours for a single service.

It may surprise you a little that, one third of the way into the 18-day experiment, I have not turned into a pale-faced shut-in. The first week even went rather well: my daily work carried on as usual, and I never had time to get bored.

Here is what those 144 hours were like, starting with the ultimate question of the universe that so many readers have asked: "How do you take out the trash if you never go out?"

At-home services can already solve countless problems, especially in Beijing

Since I started staying in, I take out the trash four or five times a day instead of once.

I am not a neat freak. Almost everyone who comes to provide a service asks whether there is anything they can take downstairs for me; most at-home services include this in their training. My household now gets rid of trash more often than when I went out to work.

In these six days, 34 strangers have knocked on my door. Some brought parcels, some delivered takeout, some came to provide a service, and some carried away all sorts of things.

Between them, they already cover life's most basic needs: food, health and getting around. Even higher-order needs, such as satisfying a craving, socializing and getting things fixed, are covered.

Some of these you could always summon by phone, such as ordering a meal, calling a car or sending flowers. Others you may never have thought of having come to you: medicine delivery, phone screen-protector fitting, even phone repair.

Open Dianping or Meituan, and the categories under at-home services no longer fit on one screen. And every kind of service has at least two or three startups competing in it.

After fitting a screen protector at my home, the Shanxiuxia technician threw in a free data cable

The tools the foot-massage therapist spread across the floor

But at-home services cannot do everything

The first challenge of life indoors was breakfast on day one.

I hadn't prepared at all, and I went through every food-delivery platform. Either I had to order in advance, or they delivered only to nearby office buildings. Later I found better solutions: Zaocanjia, for example, accepts addresses outside office buildings; or I could buy ingredients ahead of time and get up a little earlier to cook breakfast myself.

Next, I found that paying someone to shop at the supermarket for me usually costs more, and the food isn't necessarily good. Yes, it is convenient to sit at home and wait for deliveries; you don't come home smelling of fish or with mud on your shoes.

But nothing replaces the dew on freshly picked toon shoots, the freshness of a live fish a stallholder catches and cleans on the spot, or the tips you pick up from an older woman with a reusable shopping bag on her arm, squeezed in beside you at the same stall.

And if you have certain standards for your quality of life, one-hour delivery shopping services offer only a limited choice. Either you give up the brands and models you normally use and settle for what the service carries, or you order online and wait a day or more. Power cuts and illness also have to be reckoned with. In an older housing compound where bills cannot be paid online, if the electricity runs out in the middle of the night, you simply go without power or internet, sit on the balcony in the summer night breeze thinking about life, and find someone to pay the bill in person once the bank opens. At-home medical care is still a gray area; if you feel unwell, you should still get to a hospital promptly. In fact, because of legal and regulatory limits, remote medical care is not a field entrepreneurs enter lightly.

Time really is a problem

People keep asking me: if you never go out, how do you fill the time?

In fact, the strangers knocking at my door have chopped my time into fragments. In principle, users choose when service workers come, as in "Monday, 10:30 a.m., please send a cleaner." But from day one, my schedule kept getting thrown off.

Service workers often reach the neighborhood early, then phone to ask whether they can come up now. The cleaner, the foot-massage therapist and the nail artist who did my nails today all arrived about an hour early.

Tiantian, the nail artist, told me: "Usually, when we ask customers whether we can start early, they say yes, unless it's a weekday booking for 7 or 8 in the evening and they're still on their way home from work. Then we just have to wait."

I don't want to leave a craftsperson waiting an extra hour in the summer sun, but making up for the broken work rhythm costs me more time.

Then there is the opposite problem: lateness. Don't wait until you're hungry to order food; that is the first rule for anyone who wants to eat at home without cooking. And at the lunch and dinner peaks, supermarket shopping services that promise delivery within an hour often struggle to arrive on time.

Shansong, which I used twice this week, relies on crowdsourced couriers, and each order was done within a dozen or so minutes. Zhang, one of the couriers, told me: "I work in an office building nearby. When I'm not too busy and I see an order close by, I take it."

But this kind of "dedicated direct delivery" inevitably costs more in labor. Compared with a shopping service that delivers free within 3 kilometers, Shansong at 19 yuan per kilometer makes no economic sense.

Ms. Zhao, a part-time courier for Jimaisong, can only take orders after work. To do my supermarket shopping, she had to pick out the goods, queue, and then find my home from the address. It took her more than two hours, and she earned less than 10 yuan.

Weekends still need careful planning

For the weekend, I wanted to try a relatively healthy routine, in answer to friends who warned me about "piling on autumn pounds at home." From Friday afternoon I drew up a "light fasting" plan: sleep until I woke naturally, order a salad or a fruit-and-vegetable juice cleanse, and book a personal trainer to guide a workout.

The salad was where the trouble started. The salad startups nearby all deliver only on weekdays, and the juice cleanse proved just as unrealistic. I asked one company after another, and the answer was always the same: an order placed on Friday afternoon would reach me Monday morning at the earliest. One customer service agent on WeChat suggested I buy directly from a store near my home.

Of course, I can't go out.

I hit the same problem booking a personal trainer by video. After I booked online, the page said customer service would phone me between 9:00 and 21:00 to assign a coach. But weekends are when demand peaks, so it is understandable that, as of this writing, the call hasn't come.

As with the food and the trainer, perhaps I left the manicure too late, too: it took me a long time to find a nail artist with any free time today.

No salad, no juice, and even a manicure took some doing. In short, a themed weekend has to be planned in advance. In fact, most at-home services must be booked ahead. But isn't the whole point of at-home services that we can use them the moment we have time?

It is like ordering from an online store: even half a day of waiting for the delivery feels too long.

In the end, my day went like this:

[Reading] Uber "Liqiu" | Waited 24 minutes

Ordered: 10:58; arrived: 11:22; waited 24 minutes

Cost: 0 yuan

I swapped "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" with Uber for a copy of "A Chat About the Solar Terms"

After a week indoors, the ride-hailing apps on my phone would have gathered a thick layer of dust, if apps had physical form. When I got up, I found a text from Uber Beijing, an advertising company that also happens to run cars: from 11 a.m. today, entering the two characters for "Liqiu," the Start of Autumn, in the "Promotions" field would summon a mobile library with one tap.

When he learned it was awkward for me to bring the books downstairs, the Uber driver, Zhao, offered to come up and collect the books I wanted to donate. I gave away a copy of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and Zhao brought a few free gifts for me to choose from: an Uber tote bag and books with Uber stickers on them.

[Manicure] Dudu Manicure | 50 minutes early

Ordered: 01:03; booked for: 12:30; arrived: 11:40

Cost: new-user discount applied, 39 yuan paid

The toolbox the Dudu Manicure nail artist brought

For a week I had put up with the clack of long nails on the keyboard. I couldn't find the nail clippers, and the lists of goods convenience stores deliver don't seem to include such small items. With the weekend here, I decided to treat myself to a hand-care session.

Her morning booking finished early, so Tiantian, the nail artist, reached my neighborhood an hour and a half ahead of time. When she called, I was holding a spatula, caramelizing sugar for sweet-and-sour spare ribs. I worked out how long the ribs needed to stew and asked her to come straight up. She told me this happens from time to time, and customers generally understand. Sometimes a friend who is with the customer wants a manicure too; the friend can book a slot in the following days, and if time allows, she does both at once.

[Travel] WeChat | Anytime

Cost: 0 yuan

A friend sent a video from the train from Avignon to the south of France

A colleague said I should have the QDaily logo painted on my nails and slip in a bit of native advertising. But I had arranged to travel with a friend, so I didn't spend too long on the manicure.

In truth, even without video calls, I had already toured the world through my WeChat Moments: Venice, Milan, New York, Guilin, Kyoto, Yinchuan, Chengdu, and Beijing's Chaoyang District in a hailstorm. This friend was on a train from Italy to the south of France.

But the mobile signal on the train was patchy and the video kept cutting out. In the end, she recorded a short clip every so often and sent it over. A big dog belonging to the passenger across from her also said hello to the camera.

[Food delivery] Tiaoshi Hotpot Delivery | Waited 5 minutes

Ordered: 13:27; scheduled for 17:00-17:30; delivered: 17:05

Cost: 108 yuan, delivery fee waived

Tiaoshi Hotpot Delivery brings the broth and ingredients from the restaurant

Tiaoshi is an at-home service that does nothing but hotpot delivery. If needed, the courier also brings a loaned induction cooker, pots and a power strip, and after the meal you can phone for the courier to come back, clear the table and collect the tableware.

As Tiaoshi requires, I booked hotpot from within my delivery area three hours ahead. But ordering took so long that I missed the "don't borrow tableware" button, selected by default, and placed the order anyway. When the courier turned up with the broth and ingredients in an insulated box, the whole household (my roommate and me) was dumbfounded: where were the induction cooker and the pot?

Customer service said they could send a set of equipment within an hour and a half. Given the time, we decided to make do: we cooked everything in the kitchen and ate our hotpot as malatang instead.

144 hours have passed

Over these 144 hours, perhaps lingering physical discomfort took up my attention, perhaps the intensive testing made for a heavy workload, perhaps visits from friends and colleagues kept loneliness away. Either way, they may not reflect the rhythm of someone living alone at home.

As I wrote this summary, the question on my mind was how I would spend the next 288 hours. My roommate has spent the past few days in another city sorting out paperwork, but she flies to the United States on Monday. From the moment she leaves, my experiment truly becomes "288 hours alone at home." For now, I can't foresee where it will go or how it will end. Fortunately, I am happy to take life's surprises calmly, and I even look forward a little to whatever chance encounter comes next.

This week's at-home tips

Don't wait until you're hungry to order food.
Plan which services you want to use. For most services, booking and using them on the spot is still unrealistic. For services that take a long time and have relatively few workers, such as cleaning, manicures and beauty treatments, book at least a day ahead.
As with packing for a business trip, if you want to get the most out of a service like e Daixi (a laundry-bag service), learn a few packing tricks: fold clothes in half lengthwise and roll them tightly, and a single bag will hold more;
Typing while getting a neck-and-shoulder massage is even more painful than the usual "hurts so good." If you decide to relax, put work aside and rest properly;
Although most at-home services are booked through phone apps, most also call to confirm the order, so if you're going to be home all day, choose a gentler ringtone.
If you decide to hole up at home, check that the default address on your online-shopping accounts has been switched from the office back to home;
At peak hours, supermarkets and restaurants will take longer than usual whether you go yourself or have someone shop for you, so order ahead to save time.
For exercise at home, choose workouts that don't need much space. And if noise-sensitive elderly people or small children live below you, judge how hard to work out by how well your building blocks sound.
After shopping online, you usually get text messages tracking the delivery. They tend to feel intrusive, but if your phone goes unusually quiet after a purchase, something may have gone wrong with the order.
An experiment at home doesn't mean not working. Protecting a stretch of uninterrupted work time is one way to be more productive. What works for me: when I get up, I wash my hair and face and change clothes just as I would before going to the office. These fixed routines help you get into work mode quickly, instead of letting the comfort of home drag down your productivity.